All posts tagged: Hawaii

For the next two weeks (and then some) you can expect this blog to be all 1916, all the time. For a little pre-respite from that, here is the rundown of what I did in Hawaii: #1 Ate lots, and lots, and lots of poke (raw fish salad): Partly because poke is awesome, and partly because it is one of the few prepared foods available in Kaunakakai (the main town) that I was willing to eat. #2 Ate lots, and lots, and lots of poi (mashed, fermented taro root). Just because poi is awesome. #3 Watched ducklings hatch! (see that egg with the dark hole?) #4 Spent lots of time at the beach #5 And in the stream that runs through my parent’s farm: #6 Got made fun of (in a gentle, loving way) for saying little like a Kiwi (lit-tle) rather than like a Hawaiian-American (liddle) #7 Pushed the number of ohia ‘ai (mountain apples – light and sweet and refreshing, as soft as a peach but crisper) one can eat in a day without …

The next batch of ducklings have hatched on the farm, and they are adorable.* Mama Muscovy is doing a great job of protecting her little ones and keeping them nice and warm. She’s a bit huffy with us, but knows we’re not really a threat, so she did raise up enough to allow us to peek in under her and watch a couple of the eggs hatch. However, once the ducklings started venturing out a bit, she wasn’t quite so pleased when I tried to film them. In fact, she attacked my camera! No publicity for these little ones yet says Mama! OK, maybe just a few photos: * OK, when are ducklings ever not adorable?

I mentioned in the slug post that there are ducklings on the farm at the moment, and of course I wouldn’t deny you a post about them. You can think about it as a bit of adorableness to balance the total-lack-of-adorableness of the slug post. Even though Hawaii is subtropical and doesn’t have a huge amount of temperature differentiation between seasons, spring is still duckling time on the farm. My parents have both khaki campbells, which are bred for egg laying, and muscovy ducks, which are ‘nanny’ ducks. Ducks can no longer be imported into Hawaii, because of worries that they will breed with the native Laysan ducks, driving them to extinction. My parents had a healthy flock of khaki campbells from before the ban, which makes any ducklings from their flock very valuable, both for sale within the state (which is allowed), and for continuing their own flock. Unfortunately khaki campbells are very poor mothers, and our attempts to let them hatch their own clutches were extremely disappointing. You can hatch khaki campbell eggs …